    <h1>Why Open-Tran.eu?</h1>
    <p>
      Proprietary software vendors may (if they can afford it) use 
      <abbr title="Computer Assisted Translation">CAT</abbr> or 
      <abbr title="Translation Memory">TM</abbr> software in order to
      ensure the consistency of their applications' terminology.  Unfortunately,
      there are many different software vendors who are not willing to
      share their knowledge (which includes translation memory databases)
      with the others.
    </p>
    <p>
      And this is where the open source software could prove to be
      better than the proprietary.  It could, but is not.  Although
      everybody has full access to the translations of many open source
      programs, this opportunity is hardly ever used.  The knowledge
      of hundreds (if not thousands) of people translating applications into
      their native languages is not centralized and thus hardly
      available to the others.  This is the reason why the
      translations of even the most popular programs are not
      consistent with each other, which discourages people from using
      them.
    </p>
    <p>
      I'd like the Open-Tran.eu service to fill this gap and to
      provide the translators with a useful tool, which may improve
      the quality of their translations and increase the consistency
      of terminology in the open source software.
    </p>
